The afternoon brought a different kind of horror.
The door opened and two females stood there, flanked by guards. One was Vaktaire, her pale gold pelt marred by bruises that had faded to sickly yellow-green. The other was something I didn't recognize—scaled skin, eyes that didn't quite focus, movements that were too slow, too careful, like she'd learned that sudden gestures brought pain.
They didn't speak. Just gestured for me to follow.
We walked through corridors that smelled less like rot, climbed stairs that were actually clean. The room they brought me to was a shock after the cell—larger, with a sunken tub that didn't reek of decay, walls that had been scrubbed recently enough that I could still smell the cleaning solution.
The females moved around me, silent and efficient, stripping off my filthy prison uniform, guiding me into the tub.
I wanted to fight them. Wanted to scream at them to stop touching me, to leave me alone, to let me keep some shred of dignity. But their hands were gentle—impersonal but not cruel—and fighting would only bring the guards.
The water was warm. Clean. It should have felt like heaven.
Instead, it felt like preparation for slaughter. Like washing a pig before the butcher's knife.
They bathed me in silence, their hands moving over my skin with the efficiency of long practice, and I tried to ask them questions. Where were they from? How long had they been here? Were they okay?
They didn't answer. Didn't even look at me.
The Vaktaire's hands trembled as she worked soap through my hair. The scaled female had scars on her wrists—thin, precise lines that spoke of desperation and failed escapes. Her eyes were empty. Not dead, but hollow, like someone had scooped out everything that made her a person and left just the shell.
That was going to be me. If I couldn't kill Declan and get out—this was my future. Broken. Silent. Moving through the world like a ghost because the alternative was too painful to bear.
I caught sight of myself in a tarnished mirror on the wall.
The woman staring back was a stranger. Hollow-eyed. Bruised. Skin too pale, hair plastered to her skull, body trembling despite the warm water. I looked like a corpse. Like something already dead that just hadn't stopped moving yet.
When they pulled me from the tub and began to dress me, I understood why they'd bothered to clean me up.
The dress—if you could call it that—was strips of sheer fabric held together by thin chains. It covered the important bits, barely, leaving everything else exposed. My legs, my stomach, my back. The fabric was so thin I might as well have been naked.
I was a prize. A trophy. Something to be displayed and won and used. They'd stripped away everything—my clothes, my dignity, my humanity—and dressed me up like a doll for men to fight over. My body was currency. Bait. Meat on display for the highest bidder.
My hands shook as I looked down at myself. The chains clinked softly with each breath. I wanted to tear the dress off, to cover myself, to hide from the eyes that would soon be crawling over every exposed inch of skin.
But there was nowhere to hide.
The guards came back and the females melted away, their eyes downcast, bodies curled in on themselves like they were trying to take up less space in the world. A posture I knew well thanks to Declan.
The guards dragged me down more corridors, through doors that opened onto noise—a wall of sound that knocked the air from my lungs.
Hot, stinking air that tasted of metal and rot and something chemical that burned the back of my throat. I gasped despite myself, the chains on my dress clinking as my chest heaved.
Fange City sprawled before me in all its hideous glory.
Everything was the wrong color—sun-bleached metal, rust-red panels, the sickly green of corroded copper, yellow sky. Nothing matched. Nothing fit. It was like someone had taken every crashed ship in the sector and vomited them across the desert, then decided to live in the wreckage.
The streets—if you could call them that—were packed dirt and sand, stained dark in places I didn't want to think about. Refuse piled in corners. The skeletal frames of stripped vessels rose in the distance like the bones of ancient beasts, picked clean and left to bleach under the merciless sun.
They shoved me into the back of a vehicle that looked like it had been assembled from the corpses of a dozen different ships. Mismatched panels welded together, exposed wiring sparking occasionally, the whole thing listing to one side like it might fall apart if we hit a bump too hard.
I wasn't alone. Three others sat in the cargo area, chained to the walls like I was. They didn't look at me. Didn't acknowledge my existence. Their eyes were distant, already somewhere else—somewhere that wasn't here, wasn't this.
The vehicle lurched forward with a grinding sound that made my teeth ache.
Through the gaps in the paneling, I watched Fange City slide past. We moved through the market district, past the stalls I'd seen before, then into areas that got progressively worse. Buildings that were more ruin than structure. Streets that were just packed dirt and refuse. People—if you could call them that—huddled in doorways and alleys, their eyes hollow and hungry.
The city thinned out as we reached the outskirts. The buildings gave way to open wasteland, stretches of barren ground dotted with the skeletal remains of crashed ships and abandoned equipment. The sky here seemed darker somehow, like even the light didn't want to touch this place.
